The present invention relates to a lens cleaner for a disk player, which includes many types of devices such as a CD (compact disk) player, a CD-ROM (compact disk-read only memory) drive, CDV (compact disk video) player, CD-I (compact disk-interactive) player or a LD (laser disk) player having compatibility with CDs.
A conventional lens cleaner is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,117,411 as an example. The lens cleaner has brushing hair bundles formed by an assembly of about ten brushing hairs and implanted spirally on a disk with some spacing. To be more precise, some dispersion centers are set so that a phase may be shifted by 45 degrees counterclockwise from an imaginary fundamental point provided on a 1 mm outer point from the edge of the lead-in area and a shift may brought about by 1.5 mm in the radial direction from a circle passing through the imaginary fundamental point radially and outwardly at every phase shift. Each dispersion center has the air bundle implanted on it.
The above-described lens cleaner can clean a pickup lens in almost all CD players. Yet, some CD players will compulsorily stop the cleaning operation soon after the cleaning start or in the middle of the cleaning. In this case, the lens cleaner may cause "no disk error" in the player for example.
Every CD has a lead-in area as a standard in a region of 2 mm wide provided between 2 mm and 25 mm radially from the disk center. Yet, it is possible to produce a CD having a lead-in area that is set on a little different position from the standard. Therefore, many CD players controllably move the pickup lens compulsorily slightly beyond the standard lead-in area preventing the player from causing errors like burst error. The conventional lens cleaner could clean a pickup lens only for certain CD players. In other words, the compatibility of the lens cleaner depends on the control system in each CD player after all.
Some applied CD products like CDV, CD-ROM or CD-I players also may compulsorily stop the cleaning operation by the conventional lens cleaner. For example, a CD-ROM drive having the conventional lens cleaner in it will stop soon after starting to read data in a program area because of the reading error.